Nat Segaloff’s biography of Harlan Ellison gets to the roots of the celebrated science fiction author

Sunday

Oct 29, 2017 at 12:55 PM

By Ed Symkus Correspondent

Nat Segaloff, who’s from Washington, DC, moved to Boston to attend Boston University, ended up staying here for a couple of decades as a film critic, publicist, adman and college teacher, did a brief stint in New York, then returned to Boston. He has been living in Los Angeles for almost 25 years and freely admits that he always wanted to be a writer.

One of the many ways in which he’s accomplished that goal has been in the writing of biographies, subjects among them including directors Arthur Penn and William Friedkin, and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant.

His newest book, “A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison” (NESFA Press), offers a detailed look into the life, influences, successes, and warts of the talented, prolific, outspoken, argumentative, controversial author of what most fans categorize as science fiction, but what Ellison prefers to call speculative fiction.

Best known as a short story writer, he’s also got a few novels, and couple of film scripts, and lots of episodic TV on his résumé. Among his most famous work in that genre are the teleplays for “The City on the Edge of Forever” (“Star Trek”) and “Demon with a Glass Hand” (“The Outer Limits”). The short story that his fans usually put at the top of their lists is the truly creepy “I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream.”

Segaloff is one of those fans, but has been one for so long, he’s not sure which of his stories was the first he read, venturing a guess that it was “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs” from 1973. But it was when Segaloff was writing and producing the A&E “Biography” series, working on a 1995 episode about Marvel comic book honcho Stan Lee that he first interviewed Ellison, and they got to be friends.

“We just hit it off, and we would get together occasionally,” said Segaloff. “Many years later, around 2010, Harlan told me he really liked my biography of Arthur Penn, and asked me if I’d be interested in writing his biography.”

And so he set to it, conducting a series of 40 interviews with Ellison between October, 2011, and July, 2016, complementing those with quotes about Ellison from interviews with, among others, Stan Lee, Neil Gaiman, Leonard Maltin, Robert Silverberg, Leonard Nimoy and Gay Talese.

Asked how he started and eventually structured the project, Segaloff said, “I made a timeline of Harlan Ellison, from birth to the present. I wanted to put his works in order, the awards in order, and the events of his life in order.”

But interviewing and writing about the crusty Ellison turned out to be a different experience than those of his earlier biographies.

“One way it was different is that I used an aggressive interviewing technique,” said Segaloff. “Harlan has been interviewed so many times, and he was so far ahead of me, I would say, ‘I’ve heard that answer before.’ So, he would then give me something else, something fresh. It eventually became an exchange between two people just chatting. He was totally unguarded. I could ask him anything, and he would always answer.”

But then came the hard part: getting the book published, a process that still confounds and rankles Segaloff.

“The book was about 85 percent finished, and my agent was sending it around to everybody,” he said. “I read some of their rejections. I had no idea why this was happening. I didn’t sense any great conspiracy. I just felt it was the usual ignorance as well as the low regard for science fiction literature that’s still held by some people for some unaccountable reason. You know, there’s ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ and ‘Alien,’ but no, publishing still doesn’t think that science fiction is important. Then my friend and science fiction writer [and Somerville resident] Dan Kimmel made the introduction to NESFA Press (The New England Science Fiction Association), and it was pretty much an immediate yes.”

For those not familiar with the work of Harlan Ellison, what would be a good introduction to him?

Segaloff thought about that for a few seconds, then said, “I would suggest ‘Deathbird Stories’ or the large compendium ‘The Essential Ellison’.”